Friday, June 16, 2023

How I Know I'm A Nerd

 


I know I'm a nerd for one simple fact. I think spreadsheets and databases are beautiful. I love them for their simplicity. I love them for their practicality. I love them for their logic. I love them because I get them because they get me. Once another lifetime ago, when I was a girl coder building databases for a living and on a heavy project at my full-time gig and then building databases for our consulting business and then building even more databases for my own personal projects, I had a dream where I *was* a database and I woke up totally getting it. It's the only time in my entire life I have ever felt truly organized. And, in a sense, in control of my past, present and future.

If only life could be a database, I'd muse--even then. Then everything would make perfect sense!

Unfortunately, life is that interminable bug that never finds a genuine fix, and we just keep finding workarounds. That's the place I find myself in these days, but I've been on a paper journaling kick lately and have been exploring a lot of old topics that used to excite me that I have abandoned over the years due to health, time constraints or things that just fell off my radar with the passage of time. We are about to kick our consulting business into high gear again, and I am behind the curve on database development now instead of on the cutting edge, so I'm thinking of taking some coursework to brush up on my skills so I can get our business launched again in this new world of AI.

But, it also got me thinking that maybe I could get organized in real life by putting my real life into a spreadsheet or database. If I saw my clutter in data sets rather than the overwhelming stacks in closets and my junk room and garage, would that help since I used to speak fluent database? I am admittedly a little rusty, but I don't think it would take too long to brush up.


Thursday, June 15, 2023

Inching My Way Towards Confidently Failing Upwards

 It's been a while, dear readers. I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, though we almost did. Long story there and I won't have an opportunity to write about it today, but will write about it soon. Still carrying on. Still dancing, and walking. Photo is from a May hike on a gorgeous day in Des Moines. I'm in my fifties now. How did that happen!? I'll celebrate my 54th birthday next month. Hubs is lucky to have celebrated his 70th birthday in April. He had a stroke 3 years ago and was given life saving treatment in less than 10 minutes of his stroke. We are aware of how lucky we are and we are living life to its fullest. I do still blog. I rediscovered my blog over at LiveJournal. I wanted to blog in a smaller sphere for a while as I sorted through the aftermath of telling on my abusive father, but I'm ready to be more public again. I think. I'll continue blogging there, too, as I've met some really cool people on that platform.

We are semi-retired as of January 1st this year! We are still working on a handful of cases and our consulting business from home and I do some work for hubs's former partner (our brother-in-law) from time-to-time at the office, but he is also scaling back and has a part-time assistant helping him. I only get called in for special projects or if she is unavailable. I'm taking a break this afternoon from working on a spreadsheet of federal cases going to trial in the upcoming months. It's nice working from home other than hubs thinks that means I'm available to work 24/7 so I had to set some boundaries. Namely, Wednesdays are my days off and weekends are days off from legal work too, so we can get caught up on home projects.

Wednesdays are art days, mainly. I was invited by my watercolor instructor to Studio time on Wednesday mornings at the Art Guild, so I've been going. It's been wonderful! I've been creating more art than writing, which is okay. I'm creating and that's the important thing. Since I told on the monster, I haven't felt as compelled to write, although I am still writing quite a bit of poetry.

Possibly my best news is that my eyes are lasting about an hour or two longer a day than they were. They still can't last a full day, but I can use them at longer stretches than before. I have to admit, not being able to use my eyes for prolonged periods has shot my focus all to hell though, and if I wasn't certain I had ADD issues before, I'm VERY convinced now. heh

This is my year of shedding my fear of failure, so I am inching my way towards a YouTube channel where I explore things I've always wanted to do but was afraid I'd fart up. One of those things is a fear of being in front of a camera instead of behind it. So...wish me luck. My first baby goal will be to post a couple of teasers before the end of the month. I'm training for a sub 45-minute walking 5k at the end of July (though I'm getting over a head and chest cold that has knocked me out 3 weeks of training, and with lupus, I will just be happy to make it through the race without passing out at this point!!!) and the other teaser will be just for starting the channel. I have another teaser already filmed for Shimmy Mob (belly dance), but we don't have a date set for when we'll perform yet, so I'm not ready to release it yet.

A lot has changed here at good ole Blogger. I need a refresher course on how to find everyone's blogs and how to get mine out and about. I'll share this to my Twitter feed until then. Peace, love & butterflies, y'all! Until next time. xoxo 🦋